Donald Westlake - High Adventure

Witcher appeared to consider the idea briefly, but Feldspan was appalled: “Jail! Certainly not!”

“Let me tell you what’s going to happen here,” Kirby said. “As soon as the ground to the east is dry enough, a friend of mine from Belize City will bring his bulldozer in. He’s an old pal, we can trust him.”

They both looked relieved.

“What he’ll do is,” Kirby said, pointing to the base of the hill, “he’ll doze around from the bottom, just knocking the temple steps out of the way so we can get at what’s underneath; tombs, carvings, all the rest of it. When he comes to big stelae like that jaguar down there, he’ll scoop the whole thing out in one piece.”

Witcher said, “Will he really be able to work that far up the side of the temple?”

“I don’t think you get the picture,” Kirby told him. “What he’s going to do is, he’s going to knock the temple down. You come back a year from now, this’ll be just a jumble of rocks and dirt.”

“Oh,” said Witcher. They both had the grace to look embarrassed.

Kirby said, “That’s why we have to be able to trust one another. They aren’t tough about much in this country, but destruction of a Mayan temple is one of the few things that can make them really mad.”

“Yes,” Feldspan said, “I suppose it would.”

“None of us can ever say a word about this temple,” Kirby said. “Not here, and not in New York, and not anywhere. All you can tell your customers is, they’re getting guaranteed pre-Columbian pieces from Mayan ruins. That’s it. ”

Feldspan nodded solemnly. Witcher said, “You have our word, Mister Galway.”

This was the critical point, every time, with all the customers. He had to make them understand the seriousness of the laws they were about to break, and the totality of the destruction he planned on their behalf, and then he had to make them accept their shared responsibility for that destruction. Once they agreed, they were guilty in their hearts, and they knew it. They would never talk, partly out of fear of the law, partly out of fear of him, and partly out of shame.

“Okay,” Kirby said, his song done. “Seen enough?”

“I feel as though I could stand here forever,” Witcher said, gazing around at the day and the jungle and the temple, “but yes, you’re right, we should go.”

As they turned to retrace their steps, Kirby looked down the far slope and saw peeking out at him from the jungle growth down there a face that would have looked at home in these parts a thousand years ago, when all the temples were red and all the people short, mocha- colored, flat-faced, and utterly unknowable. A Mayan Indian face, male, possibly 30 years old, peering bright-eyed up the slope. The wide mouth grinned, like an imp. The right eye winked.

Behind his back, so Witcher and Feldspan wouldn’t see, Kirby gestured for the face to disappear. Queering the deal for jokes! The face stuck out its tongue, then faded from view.

As the trio made their way down-slope toward the plane, Feldspan said, with his own impish smile, “I suppose you must have access to some pretty good pot yourself down here, Mister Galway.”

“When we get back to Belize City,” Kirby promised him, “I will blow your head right off your shoulders.”

Feldspan giggled.

“I’ll sit up front with you,” Valerie said.

The cabdriver, finished stowing her luggage in the trunk, seemed pleased by that idea. “Oh, sure,” he said. “Sure ting, Miss.” Running around his big rusty green Chevrolet, he opened the right front door and giggled with embarrassment, saying, “I just clear some junk first, just some m>count junk.” He tried to shield the girlie magazines with his body, throwing them and the plastic coffee cups and the beer bottles and the wads of crumpled wax paper and the sun-yellowed newspapers with their thick black headlines — FARM MINISTER CALLED “IGNORANT”! — over the seatback in a shower of trash onto the rear seat and floor. Behind them, on the other side of the airport building, the plane from New Orleans roared as it flew away.

“All okay now, Miss,” the driver said, stepping back, holding the door open. His round face beamed with happiness in the late afternoon as his eyes swiveled toward his envious colleagues clustered around the other taxis, shooting him dark looks. A great big six-footer American woman with nipple bumps on her shirt, and she’s going to ride up front . Probably perform fellatio on the way to town.

Valerie, only faintly aware of the stir she was causing, and blessedly not suspecting the deep depravity in the minds all about her, lowered herself onto the fairly clean sagging seat and lifted her long blue-jeaned legs in, placing her Adidas on the suburb of trash on the floor. Her attaché case she laid on her lap. The driver, fat and soft-bodied, beaming, perspiring, carefully closed her door, trotted around to his own side, clambered in behind the wheel, and said, “Okay, now. All set now.”

“Fort George Hotel, please,” Valerie said.

“Oh, sure.” He started the engine, which coughed and cleared its throat and wheezed pitiably, while the car shook all over. He turned the wheel several times this way and that before actually shifting into Drive to force the laboring engine to do some real work, and then they bumped and sagged away from the airport building and out onto a blacktop road with jungle on the right and what looked like an army base on the left.

“It’s hot,” Valerie said.

“Oh, yes,” the driver said, nodding, keeping his eye on the absolutely empty road ahead. “Hotter before. When de Miami plane came, very hot. Cooler now.”

So that was another reason in favor of her having taken the later plane, connecting through New Orleans. Not only had she given herself an extra two hours in New York to finish squaring things away, and not only was her appointment with Mr. Innocent St. Michael not until tomorrow morning, but she had also avoided the hottest part of the day in Belize. The temperature in New York had been 27 when she’d left.

Nevertheless, it was still quite hot here, probably nearly 80. Pointing to the controls on the dashboard, Valerie said, “Maybe we should have the air-conditioning.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, sounding sorry, “but dat’s broken. Completely entirely not functioning. Not even de little fan.” Then he looked at her with such intense sincerity that even Valerie understood he was about to tell a lie. “We’re waiting for a part,” he said.

“I see,” she said.

They drove in warm and fairly companionable silence for a while — a sluggish Tom Sawyer -like river now on the right, jungle alternating with shacks in clearings on the left — and then the driver said, “You goin’ on to Ambergris Caye?”

“No, I’m not,” she said. “What’s there?”

He seemed surprised. “You don’t know our barrier reef? Beautiful reef, beautiful water. We get many people come down to Belize just to go to dat reef.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Photography, you know? Beautiful fishes dere. Scuba diving. We get lots of people. And sailboats!” he added, as though it were the clincher in an argument.

“Sounds lovely,” Valerie said, to be polite. “If I have time, maybe I’ll visit.”

He gave her a quick glint-eyed look and away, then said, “You’d be very good, uh, diving. Good long legs.”

“I suppose so, yes,” said Valerie.

“Good long strong legs,” the cabdriver said, nodding, staring through the windshield at some vision of his own. “Very good in diving. I like a woman witt good long strong legs.”